When Gov. Pat Quinn and Union Pacific Railroad President and COO Lantz Fritz came to Rockford in May to announce the return of passenger train service after a 34-year absence, passenger rail advocates west of the Forest City were angry.

The new train, to start running in 2015, will go from Chicago to Rockford, where it will terminate, because that’s where the UP’s track ends. The line west of Rockford was torn up in stages in the 1970s and early 1980s.

People west of Rockford believed the Amtrak service would extend to their cities along the Canadian National’s Iowa Division line, the only remaining track west of Rockford that runs through Freeport and Galena to Iowa.

They protested that they’d been forgotten. They hadn’t been, but that was no consolation. Quinn’s minions (Quinnions?) at the Illinois Department of Transportation worked for several years to reach an agreement with Canadian National Railway to run Amtrak trains from Chicago to Dubuque. That was the route favored by IDOT.

But CN proved difficult to deal with, Quinn said. So, he made the $223 million deal using Metra tracks to Elgin and the UP from Elgin, Huntley and Belvidere to Rockford.

Enter U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Springfield. Durbin has been working on restoring passenger trains to northern Illinois ever since he took office in 1997. Durbin is frustrated with the gigantic transcontinental railway based in Montreal, Quebec. CN owns the tracks of the former Illinois Central.

Last Thursday Durbin wrote to the company’s president, Claude Mongeau, about the passenger train situation.

“The State of Illinois and Amtrak have been trying to negotiate an agreement with CN to bring new passenger rail service from Chicago to Rockford and Galena. Last month, the State of Illinois announced it is pursuing an alternate route between Chicago and Rockford along Union Pacific tracks,” Durbin said.

“This decision was due largely to the lack of cooperation from CN, which owns the originally selected route between those two cities. Unfortunately, the only feasible rail route west from Rockford to Galena runs along the CN. The State of Illinois and Amtrak will not be able to provide service to Galena as long as CN slow walks negotiations and makes unreasonable capital demands.”

I asked CN spokesman Patrick Waldron about Durbin’s letter. “CN has received the senator’s letter and is preparing a response,” Waldron said. Stay tuned.

I know it is not the state’s fault that the one railroad that could serve northwest Illinois has been the impediment to getting the job done. Just the same, this situation illustrates once again that Illinois’ government has neglected a part of the state in great need of infrastructure development.

Page 2 of 2 - The lack of progress on completing U.S. 20 as a freeway west of Freeport and around Galena is perhaps the leading example of that benign neglect. It has hurt economic development in a part of the state that desperately needs jobs.

My dad, who was born in 1907, had a good friend when he was in the Boy Scouts. Their troop used to go on adventures, including hiking to the Mississippi River from a railroad siding somewhere west of Freeport, where a train dropped them off.

That friend grew up to be a highway planner with the state. Decades after my father died, after I’d written one of many columns urging improvement of U.S. 20, he called me and said he’d been one of the men who had been planning the modernization of U.S. 20 to be a four-lane, divided highway — in 1937!

Of course, World War II got in the way and money was diverted to the war effort. Afterward, the project sat on the shelf.

To be sure, some progress has been made. The highway was turned into a four-lane between Rockford and Freeport in the 1950s. The Freeport bypass is complete. As for that remaining gap from east of Freeport and around Galena, we’ve had $1 billion worth of lip service from three generations of politicians, but no bulldozers.